Defend Yourself!

Posted on 28 February 2005

Three teenagers attack an art teacher and beat her to the ground on video… A group of teenage girls trap and beat another teenage girl until she’s in the hospital severely injured… An elementary school child is pushed on the playground, tells the pusher not to do that again and gets punched for having said anything. The child who is punched doesn’t fight back because he doesn’t want to get in trouble at school and, therefore (he believes) with his parents at home. What do all these events have in common? The demonstrate a growingly common mindset in the United States: don’t fight back. No matter why the teacher didn’t fight back… no matter why the teenager didn’t fight to escape… no matter why that elementary school child didn’t defend himself, all of them failed to exercise a basic human right: that of self-defense. I can’t help but wonder, why?

Personally I think this has something to do with an ever-growing, ever-expanding belief system that designates violence in any form, for any reason, as wrong. I can’t say for sure where such an attitude started, but I do have some beliefs about how it has become so widespread in our society: first and foremost I believe the zero tolerance policies which have existed in our public schools for decades now have something to do with it.

The full text of this article is available in the anthology titled American Thinking II.
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